NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2010

Clune Jeff, Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for FY 2010. The fellowship supports a research and training plan entitled "Identifying the Environmental Attributes that Drive the Evolution of Complexity in Organisms" for Jeff Clune. The host institution for this research is Cornell University, and the sponsoring scientist is Lipson Hod. One of the major open questions in biology is how evolution produces the complexity seen in natural forms, such as the structural organization (regularity, modularity, and hierarchy) of bodies and brains. The environmental pressures that drive the evolution of such structural organization are poorly understood largely because they are difficult to study experimentally in natural systems. Understanding structural organization is important, however, because it is a fundamental property of biological systems, because it affects how organisms will respond to novel environments, and because it increases the speed of evolutionary adaptation, which opens possibilities for improving bioengineering. The Fellow is taking advantage of computational systems that exhibit evolutionary dynamics to identify the environmental attributes that drive the evolution of structural organization. Specifically, the research (1) develops novel statistical algorithms to quantify structural organization, (2) uses evolution experiments in computers to test whether eight different environmental attributes drive the evolution of structural organization, (3) quantifies structural organization in biological phenotypes, (4) tests if the environmental drivers of structural organization in computer evolution experiments (identified in 2) also drive structural organization in biological phenotypes (using data from 3). The training goals include enhancing mathematical and machine learning skills and better understanding computational models of brains. The broader impacts include development of a website that allows visitor participation in evolving structurally-organized phenotypes, and publishing open-source software tools for quantifying structural organization.